Meeting in August (Translated, from the Spanish, by Edith Grossman.)

A fifty-two-year-old happily married woman makes her annual visit to her mother’s grave on a Caribbean island and initiates an anonymous one-night stand with a man she meets at the hotel bar. She had made the same trip for twenty-eight consecutive years every August 16th at the same time of day, in the same room of the same hotel, under the fiery sun of the same impoverished cemetery, in order to place a bouquet of fresh gladiolus on her mother’s grave and give her mother the news from home. Her name was Ana Magdalena Bach, she had celebrated the twenty-third anniversary of her harmonious marriage to a man who loved her and whom she had married without finishing her degree in literature, still a virgin. That evening, after eating a sandwich at the hotel bar, she saw a man in a white linen suit with metallic hair and a musketeer’s mustache looking at her and offered to buy him a drink. Ana Magdalena guessed his age and erred by one year too many: forty-six. She played at discovering his native country from his accent but was wrong three times. She tried to guess his profession, he hurried to say he was a civil engineer, and she suspected it was a trick to keep her from finding out the truth. By the time the bar closed, at eleven, she knew him as if she had always lived with him, and invited him to her room. She pulled off his clothes and straddled him. She took him in all the way to her soul and devoured him for herself, not thinking about him. After a long hour of whispered banalities, for the first time they kissed on the mouth. This was when he showed himself to be an exquisite lover who carried her, without haste, to the heights of excitement. When she woke during the night, she began to mischievously tap her fingers on the man’s back, but she realized he was pretending to be asleep to avoid the prospect of a third time. She fell into a deep sleep. At daybreak, without warning, she was struck by the brutal awareness that for the first time in her life she had fornicated and slept with a man who wasn’t hers. Shaken, she turned to look at him over her shoulder, and he wasn’t there. Until then she hadn’t realized that she knew nothing about him, not even his name, and all that remained of her night of madness was a faint lavender scent in the air. Only when she picked up the book she’d left on the night table—Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”—did she realize that in its horror-filled pages he had left a twenty-dollar bill.